An algebraic approach to combining processes in a hardware/software partitioning environment

Abstract

In this paper we present a strategy for combining processes belonging to the same hardware or software component (cluster), in the context of hardware/software partitioning of a system. The strategy takes as input an occam description of a system. This description is the parallel composition of the system components in a predefined form, together with annotations that indicate how the processes, in each cluster, must be combined: by serialisation or by parallelisation. The description given as input can be seen as a binary tree. The strategy to combine processes is based on the reduction of possible configurations in that tree, by using transformation rules which are provable from an algebraic semantics of occam.